Stories and Tall Tales

Dave Wares on Andy Gibson

Andy Gibson.

A big, looming hippy; ever-smiling and enthusiastic, and usually able to get funding and/or respectability for whatever madcap scheme or idea we came up with.

Andy lived for a while in a flat overlooking Mowbray Park with CAPS stalwart Mick Catmull. And a cat called Jackson.
The flat was regularly burgled.
The burglars would sit on the hill opposite his flat and watch until he’d left for work, then break in and steal everything stealing. Rumour has it that he had so little in the way of material goods, the burglars took pity and eventually they started to leave things in his flat.
Video recorders.
A working TV.
Batteries for his radio.
Catfood.


When he first came to Sunderland, Andy worked at Ford & Pennywell Youth Wing, where he made contact with, and tried to politically re-educate, the Pennywell branch of the National Front.

Legend has it that, one night, while driving a minibus full of Pennywell skinheads back from a Two-Tone gig, he questioned the skins as to the validity of their ‘white-supremacist’ stance.

‘So what made you become neo-Nazis?’ Andy asked, hoping to turn the conversation into a searching and ultimately self-actualising discussing about the nature of racism and bigotry, whereupon the skinheads would realise the error of their ways, give up their lives of violence, and become vegetarian socialists.

‘We’re not neo-Nazis.’
‘That’s good,’ Andy told them, thinking that the first step in change would be a rejection of their odious self-inflicted label.
‘We’re just Nazis.’
‘Oh. Right.’

But Andy was a good bloke - he matched his hippy ideals with real action, something very unusual for a youth & community worker in Sunderland in the 80’s. I suspect the Bunker would have existed in a much lesser form without him.

Where is he now? Living in a commune? Possibly. Working as a stonemason, renovating some 11th century Saxon church? Very possibly.

Still wearing those minging jeans?
Definitely.